Upgunned (28 page)

“You switched guns on me, didn't you?” I asked.

Cap almost smiled. “What makes you think that?”

I didn't look at the
SIG
at all. It was a copy, a substitute, not the weapon I had manhandled through primary gun school. I just knew. “This feels different,” I said. “I'd know it even in a dark room. I think you swapped out my stainless steel
SIG
with the blank adapter for an identical
SIG
without. I think you just handed me a mag of live rounds and I just loaded them into a hot gun.”

“Well, if you're so fucking smart,” said Cap, “why don't you take a shot at one of those bottles over there?”

Behind the row of bottles was a stack of junkers. This would prevent wild shots from flying off into the troposphere, or maybe landing on some poor civilian's skull a town and a half away.

Cap handed over shooting glasses and a set of bright red headphones. He donned a pair himself. We had used these on the set to adumbrate the noise of movie gunfire. We had worn them constantly on the
Night of Thunder
. I had doffed them a couple of times just to hear the palette of noise for real.

Now Cap's voice was muffled and distant although he was speaking louder to compensate. “We can lose this later so you can get used to live fire.”

The last time I had heard a live round go off—as Elias—was in my darkroom where it had converted me into a snail-ball on the floor.

“Ready on the firing line,” Cap said. “Hot range.”

I stepped up to the line Cap had etched in the dirt and lifted the gun in a two-handed grip.

Before I could thumb back the hammer, Cap said, “No.”

“What?”

“That's really adorable,” Cap said of the aggro way I held the piece. “That's called a ‘cup and saucer.' See how your left hand is underneath your shoot hand? Cup and saucer. What's that for, to keep you from dropping it?”

“I thought—”

“No,” he overrode. “Are you in SWAT? Do you know the two-step? How not to cross your legs in front of each other? No. Shoot it one-handed. Full extension of your arm. The gun is a method of reaching out, long-distance.”

I had practiced this during my dry-firing. Now the weight of the gun at the end of my arm was nothing at all. Muscle memory accommodated it.

“That sight is zeroed,” Cap said. “Just line it up and drop it just a hair to compensate for the top of the sight because you're looking at the dots. See? There's a microscopic difference. Pull it to full cock.
Then
aim, the way I just told you.”

“Trigger?”

“Just kiss it with your fingertip. You know the pull already, about four pounds. Squeeze, don't jerk. Whenever you're ready.”

I shut one eye and might have even stuck out my tongue tip, real Western.

“Don't do that,” said Cap. “You ain't fucking one-eyed Pete or something. Try to keep both eyes open. You won't be able to on the first shot, but you can learn how.”

Binocular vision seemed to veto this, so I just turned my head a bit.

“Fire when ready.”

“Very apropos,” I said.

Bang
.

The
SIG
nearly jumped out of my hand. My wrist felt slammed as though I was sparring with a boxer and had just caught a good punch.

A sad little wisp of dust spiraled into the air behind the bottles, which the bullet had come nowhere near. I held the extension; the gun was ready to fire again, so I did not drop sights or wave it around as if it were spent. It was ready; I was still owlishly awaiting permission to fire again.

“Correct your aim and fire again,” said Cap. “Don't drop your arm until you're out.” Out meant empty.

The second shot was easier. Now I anticipated the recoil, even though it completely spoiled my aim. The third shot came faster and easier.

“Don't rush through it,” said Cap. “Aim. Otherwise you're just pissing on a hot plate. Don't crush the trigger. Don't snap it.”

The gun seemed to beg to be fired. That was its purpose. Each shot flowed more smoothly into the next.
Bang, bang
. The air seemed to evacuate from around my head with each discharge; that was something I wasn't used to and did not expect. I regained control of my arm quicker, and compensated for the up-and-down bob.
Bang
.

Bang
. The action locked back. I knew it would, but it still seemed odd to see it do that all on its own. The gun was ready to be fed again.

I hadn't hit a single thing except the backstop of junkers.

“Barrel down, finger off the trigger,” Cap said. I had forgotten to do that. “Now, in competition, speed-reloading is a big deal but we're not gonna worry about that right now. Here.” He lifted the
SIG
from my grasp and dumped the empty magazine.

I stared at the inviolate row of bottles. “Jesus,” I said. “I
suck
.”

“Naah, you're just getting started,” said Cap. “First time you shot a picture, was it a perfect picture?”

“Anything but.”

“Well, there you go.” He unsnapped his Para-Ord .45, pulled the hammer to full cock, and emptied his mag in about three seconds—nine shots. Each bottle sprouted a wide mouth and collapsed or began spewing water. Nine bottles, nine bullets, nine hits, no waiting.

“Okay,” he said as the air spiced up with gunsmoke, “now it's your turn again.”

A little later—after I had hit two bottles out of nine in, I don't know, thirty seconds—Cap lined up a set of different targets at the same distance. Smaller.

“What are those?” I said. “DVDs?”

Yeah, they were. Nine copies of
Die Hard 2
. I had to ask.

“Worst offender of all,” Cap said. “You don't just pull a clip of blanks out of a goddamned MP5 and substitute live ammo. That gun needs blank adapters to cycle blanks. First live round would make the fucking gun blow up in your hand.”

“You mean there's no such thing as a porcelain gun?” I said, paraphrasing Bruce Willis.

“There no such thing as a ‘Glock 7'
at all
,” he said with unveneered contempt. “They made that shit up. The guns in that movie are Glock 17s with lipstick on 'em, as I like to say. Tarted up. But they're not porcelain, or plastic, or any goddamned thing because they'd blow up or melt if you shot them. Glocks have polymer parts, sure, but there's plenty of steel or the gun
would not work
. And the ammo would show up on X-ray. And they're not made in Germany; they're made in Austria, for fuck's sake.”

Another mag for the Para-Ord and four seconds later, all nine copies of the special edition had burst apart into plastic shrapnel, disabled from spreading their untruths.

“And don't even get me started on how a round from a Beretta nine can't punch through a mahogany table and still have enough velocity to kill a guy,” he said. “Maybe one round in twenty.”

He handed me a Beretta 92F and a magazine. “You don't believe me, see for yourself.”

 

PART NINE

A MAN CALLED JACK

I watched Clavius speak to the detective from my secret hiding place. It took a fair bit of setting up, but I needed a read on Elias McCabe's mentor before I decided whether he was worth killing.

Prior to that trick ‘r treat I found out a bit more about the Clavius empire. The “C” Corporation was diversified into things ranging from paper products—like the watermarked photo paper—to a hand sanitizer called ElGel, marketed under the company division named Illium, after Marlowe's poem about the siege of Troy. At a glance it did not appear that Clavius spent as much time on art anymore as he did on being Clavius; his last big show of note had been titled “9/11.5.” He had invested much more time in becoming his
own
artwork.

I settled into my hide to observe as the artwork spoke to the cop.

Detective First Grade Hanson Stoner Jr. was admitted—gradually—to Clavius's offices on the power of his shield and ID, representing Manhattan South borough, Fourteenth Precinct, also known as Midtown Precinct South. His gold shield bore no number (lieutenants and above being identified by their tax registry numbers instead) and the laminate ID card's photo featured Stoner against a red background, indicating he was commissioned to carry a firearm. The photo looked about two years old; Stoner had threads of gray in his now slightly longer blond hair and brush mustache. A lot of New York cops had cookie-dusters like his.

Clavius was clad in a loose white cable-knit sweater and worsted wool slacks, and tended to keep the air conditioning on his floor about five degrees below comfortable. Right behind Stoner an attendant wheeled in a full service coffee tray and parked it at the edge of a vast Persian rug, a Herez Serapi with 180 knots per square inch, a steal at $40,000. There wasn't a mote of dust in the room, which contained a twenty-foot curve of glass desk piled haphazardly with things needing Clavius's attention, several mammoth modernist canvases (slightly disturbing in their implied chaos; I did not recognize the artist, but then, I had only recently acquired my first piece of what could be termed “art,” myself), and a museum-framed Picasso ink sketch hung in an obvious place of honor. Clavius was washing his hands in a small wet bar sink when Stoner was escorted in. As always, his complexion was rosy, as if he had just vigorously scrubbed his face. He had some green-toned aloe vera concoction he used to cut the red whenever his image was to be captured by nontechnical photographers. White brows, white hair, cut medium short and combed straight back. It was completely unfair, yet impossible not to see him as the privileged scion of some woebegone ex-Gestapo guy. He ignored Stoner completely until he had finished drying his hands, then regarded him on silent standby, forcing Stoner to cross the rug, to come to
him
for the pro forma handshake, which was three dry pumps followed by a grab for the nearest bottle of ElGel. He had on Japanese paper slippers and requested that Stoner remove his shoes prior to crossing the expanse of rug.

This guy Clavius was all about power games, and had obviously taken Sun Tzu far too seriously.

“First Grade Detective Stoner,” said Clavius, glancing at the card on the glass tabletop but not touching it. “That's an odd notion, isn't it? A detective of first grade would be in charge of, what? Recess? Ah, please disregard my pathetic little jokes, Detective. Wordplay is one of the few things that stimulates me anymore.” That was obvious from his cutesy company name, designed so his single letter “C” would appear right after the copyright symbol, another “c.”

His limpid, colorless eyes evaluated Stoner. “Are you a lieutenant or a sergeant, or—?”

“No, sir, that's a TV thing,” said Stoner, his eyes still taking in the huge office space. “I'm an investigator—about the same pay grade as a lieutenant. The investigative supervisors you see on TV, the guys in charge of all aspects of a job, are only a small percentage. I can't even give orders to a uniformed officer, when it comes right down to it.”

“Fascinating,” said Clavius, indicating that it was anything but. He stationed himself in a Humanscale Liberty chair on the boss side of the desk so Stoner would not try to touch him again. The Liberty chair was the fashionista answer to the Aeron, which had become so popular with the commonweal that it now appeared antimillennial and dated. Clavius was already offended that this man, Stoner, assumed he, Clavius, was the sort of person who sat around watching television. Stoner looked for another chair; or wherever he was supposed to sit. There was no other chair.

“Have you come to ask about Charlene Glades?” asked Clavius. “Hideous, what befell her. Barbaric. Grief like this is draining.”

“Actually, sir, I've come to ask you about Elias McCabe.” Stoner had begun a tight circle pace on the far side of the desk, like a prosecutor summing up. “You said that he was acting erratically the last time you saw him.”

“Detective, ‘erratic' is one word. It is
a
word. It does not adequately encompass how upset McCabe seemed to be, how wild and distraught. It immediately seemed to me that he was losing his grip on sanity. He babbled, quite frankly, about an internecine plot to implicate him in … what? A blackmail? A murder? I'm still not sure myself—
that's
how crazy he seemed. It was as though he was confecting a melodrama: He was abducted, forced to take photographs, bribed, then attacked in some arcane retribution, so he said. The sole proof he had of any of this were some obviously staged photographs and a bit of muddy videotape, which he put on my Web site, thereby implicating me. Worse, he cast me into an uncomfortable position with a magazine by failing to do his job. Then people began to die. It looks very bad for him, doesn't it? Running and hiding. Elias was never the bravest of men, Detective, if you'll pardon that observation.”

“Where would he run?” asked Stoner. “Where would he hide?”

“Well, that all depends on his measure of guilt, yes? If he has lost his mind to the point of taking people's lives, who can say? If he is innocent and is merely cowering in some squalid hideout, who knows where he went? He had an obvious alcohol and drug dependency. His lover had just walked out on him. Perhaps he was despondent to the degree he would make harsh, rash, impulsive decisions you or I could not even theorize. He wasn't always that way. He was talented and reliable. But now…”

“What happened to Charlene Glades was clearly done by a lunatic, sir,” Stoner said, withdrawing a legal folder from a vinyl folio case he had brought in. “Patterned after one of McCabe's own photographs. Would you like me to show you the pictures?”

Clavius got redder. “No, sir, I would not.”

Stoner was good—he had laid back and let Clavius do the talking, then ambushed him with crime scene shots he knew Clavius would never look at, all to gauge his reactions. He shot that last “sir” back at Clavius like a bolt from a crossbow.